alt Hacker NewsLibbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga
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The feature matrix says cbz/zip doesn't have random page access, but it definitely does. Zip also supports appending more files without too much overhead.
Certainly there's a complexity argument to be made, because you don't actually need compression just to hold a bundle of files. But these days zip just works.
The perf measurement charts also make no sense. What exactly are they measuring?
Edit:
This reddit post seems to go into more depth on performance: old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qi64pr/comment/o0pqaeo/
But with which library are you able to host these? And which scraper currently finds manga with chapters in that file format? does anybody have experience hosting their own manga server & downloading them?
At a glance this looks like an obviously nicer format that a zip of jpegs, but I struggle to think of a time I thought "wow CBZ is a problem here".
I didn't even realize random access is not possible, presumably because readers just support it by linear scanning or putting everything in memory at once, and comic size is peanuts compared to modern memory size.
I suppose this becomes more useful if you have multiple issues/volumes in a single archive.
I thought zips already support random access?
I assume the comparison table is supposed to have something other than footnotes (e.g. check-marks or X's)? That's not showing for me on Firefox
Honest question, something I don't understand, if you use DirectStorage to move images directly to the GPU (I assume into the VRAM) where the decoding take place? directly on the GPU? Can GPU decode PNG? it is very unfriendly format for GPU as far as I know
> Footer indexed
So, like ZIP?
> Uses XXH3 for integrity checks
I don’t think XXH3 is suitable for that purpose. It’s not cryptographically secure and designed mostly for stuff like hash tables (e.g. relatively small data).